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<div class="published" title="2012-08-12T15:27:50">August 12, 2012</div>
<h3 class="entry-title">Paul Ryan’s Budget Games</h3>
<div class="byline">Posted by <cite class="vcard author"><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/james_surowiecki/search?contributorName=James%20Surowiecki" title="search site for content by James Surowiecki" rel="author">James Surowiecki</a></cite></div>
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<p><img alt="120409_r22039_p233.jpg" src="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/120409_r22039_p233.jpg" class="mt-image-right" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 20px 20px;" height="314" width="233"></p>
<p>In theory, Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate
has the potential to turn this Presidential campaign into a substantive
ideological debate over the proper role and size of government in the
United States. And the general reaction from the media has been that
this is, in fact, what Ryan’s selection will mean—as the New York <i>Times </i>put
it in a banner front-page headline today, by putting Ryan on the
ticket, Romney is “pushing fiscal issues to the forefront.” But if that
kind of clarifying, substantive debate is in fact to materialize, Ryan
(and Romney) will need to be a lot more explicit, and a lot more honest,
about what their budget proposals would actually do to the U.S.
government. </p>
<div id="entry-more"><p>That may sound a bit strange, since so many
stories about Ryan emphasize how serious and wonky he is, and insist
that, unlike most politicians, he’s actually willing to talk in detail
about the policies he’s advocating. Yet the reality of Ryan’s approach
is actually very different. His tax plan, for instance, calls for
trillions of dollars in tax cuts (heavily weighted, of course, toward
high-income earners), but also claims to be revenue-neutral, since Ryan
says that the tax cuts will be offset by eliminating loopholes and tax
subsidies. But when it comes to detailing exactly what loopholes and
subsidies he wants to get rid of, Ryan clams up—just as Romney has done
with his tax plan. This is politically astute, since eliminating the tax
benefits that have a substantive budget impact would mean eliminating
things voters love, like the mortgage-tax deduction. But it’s a far cry
from being honest and tough-minded.</p>
<p>Similarly, while Ryan has been reasonably upfront about his plans for
Social Security (which he wants to privatize) and Medicare (which he
wants to turn into a defined-contribution, rather than a
defined-benefit, plan), he has been both substantively and rhetorically
obfuscatory when it comes to the way his budget cuts would, over time,
radically shrink the federal government, and effectively make it
impossible for the government to do most of what it does today. As the
Congressional Budget Office analysis of Ryan’s budget makes clear,
Ryan’s plan would mean that by 2050, all of the government’s
discretionary spending (including the defense budget) would account for
less than four per cent of G.D.P. Since defense spending in the postwar
era has never been less than three per cent of G.D.P., and since Romney
has said during the campaign that he doesn’t want defense spending to be
below four per cent of G.D.P., this means that the only way for Ryan’s
numbers to work would be to effectively eliminate nearly all non-defense
discretionary spending, including not just much of the social safety
net but infrastructure spending, R. & D. investment, federal support
for education, air-traffic control, regulatory and public safety
spending, and so on. This would be, needless to say, a radical remaking
of the federal government. Indeed, as I wrote in <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2012/04/09/120409ta_talk_surowiecki">a column</a>
earlier this year, with the exception of support for health care and
retirement, it would basically return the federal government to
something like its nineteenth-century role—and early nineteenth-century
at that. </p>
<p>Good luck getting Ryan (let alone Romney) to admit this to you. While
Ryan is good at talking about the need to shrink government spending,
he’s actually not forthright about what this would actually mean to
voters. While he goes into more detail about his short-term spending
cuts (which would be targeted largely at areas like aid to the working
poor, education, and so on) than about the tax loopholes he would
supposedly close, he refrains from explaining how, exactly, the
government would function if discretionary spending were just 0.75 per
cent of G.D.P. Indeed, when Ryan Lizza <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/06/120806fa_fact_lizza">interviewed him for this magazine</a>,
Ryan said, “We think government should do what it does really well, but
that it has limits, and obviously within those limits are things like
infrastructure, interstate highways, and airports.” But his own budget
proposal would, in practice, make it impossible for the government to
invest in and maintain infrastructure, highways, and airports. That kind
of rhetorical two-step is par for the course for Ryan—he says he wants a
“full-throated defense” of the Republican agenda, but he’s adept at
disguising the radicalness of his proposals, as when he describes his
proposed cuts to things like Medicaid as “strengthening the social
safety net.” </p>
<p>Ryan has been able to pull off this bait-and-switch game, and win the
hearts of many Washington pundits, because his earnest, wonky manner
makes it seem as if he’s a hard-nosed pragmatist who’s just listening to
what the numbers tell him. (In <i>Slate</i> yesterday, Will Saletan, in a <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2012/08/paul_ryan_for_vice_president_he_s_the_fiscal_conservative_a_republican_should_be_.html">column</a>
extolling Romney’s choice, wrote that while he would be voting for
Obama this time around, he could easily imagine voting for Ryan in 2016,
which is an utterly incoherent position, something like voting for John
F. Kennedy in 1960 and Barry Goldwater in 1964.) But Ryan is not a
pragmatist; he is an ideologue. His budget proposals are driven not by
the demands of America’s current fiscal situation, but rather by deeply
held convictions about the need to limit government power. There’s
absolutely nothing wrong with this—if you believe that “big” government
destroys personal initiative and strangles the economy, and that the
current tax system is morally offensive and economically destructive,
then you need to not just tinker with the system, but to remake it.
What’s wrong is that, so far, Ryan hasn’t been honest about the fact
that this is what he wants to do—probably because most voters, including
most Republicans, don’t actually want to dramatically shrink the
government. Perhaps this campaign will change that. But I’m not holding
my breath. </p>
<p><em>For more on Romney, Ryan, and the rest of the campaign, bookmark <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/politics">The Political Scene</a>, our hub for coverage of the 2012 election.</em></p>
<p><em>Illustration by Christoph Niemann</em></p></div>
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